Willie now had a rough idea where they were. He had a strong wish to be in touch with Sarojini. He thought he might write and ask her to send a letter to the poste restante of a city where they were going.
Einstein said no. The police now understood that ruse. Poste restante letters were not common, and the police would be looking for poste restante letters from Germany. Because of the weavers they had had a comparatively easy journey so far, and Willie might think they were overdoing the caution; but Willie had to remember that they were on a shoot-on-sight police list.
They moved to one city, then to another. Einstein was the leader. He was trying now to get someone in public life to talk to the police.
Willie was impressed. He asked, “How do you know all of this?”
Einstein said, “I had it from the old section leader. The man who went out and then killed his wife.”
“So he was planning his break-out all the time I knew him?”
“Some of us were like that. And sometimes those are the very people who stay and stay, for ten, twelve years, and become quite soft in the head, unfit for anything else.”
For Willie this time of waiting, this moving to new cities, was like the time he had spent in the street of the tanners, when he didn’t know what was going to follow.
Einstein said, “We are waiting on the police now. They are going through our case. They want to know what charges have been laid against us before they can accept our surrender. They are having some trouble with you. Someone has informed on you. It’s because of your international connections. Do you know a man called Joseph? I don’t recall a man called Joseph.”
Willie was about to speak.
Einstein said, “Don’t tell me anything. I don’t want to know. That is our arrangement.”
Willie said, “There is actually nothing.”
“That is almost the hardest thing to deal with.”
“If they don’t accept my surrender, what then?”
“You hide, or they kill you or arrest you. But we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”
Some time later Einstein announced, “It’s all right, for both of us. Your international connections were not so menacing, after all.”
Einstein telephoned the police, and the day came when they went to the police headquarters of the town where they were. They went in a taxi and Willie saw a version of what Raja out of his own excitement had shown him in another town a long time ago: an army-style area created in the British time, the now old trees planted at that time, whitewashed four or five feet up from the ground, the white kerbstones of the lanes, the sandy parade ground, the stepped pavilion, the welfare buildings, the two-storey residential quarters.
The superintendent’s office was somewhere there, on the lower floor. When they entered the office, the man himself, in civilian clothes, stood up, smiling, to welcome them. The gesture of civility wasn’t at all what Willie was expecting.
He thought, “Bhoj Narayan was my friend. My heart went out to Ramachandra. Without Einstein I wouldn’t have known how to get here. But the man in front of me in this office is much more my kind of person. My heart and mind reach out at once to him. His face radiates intelligence. I have to make no allowances for him. I feel we are meeting as equals. After my years in the bush — years when in order to survive I made myself believe things I wasn’t sure of — I feel this as a blessing.”
SEVEN. NOT THE SINNERS
HE THOUGHT AT the end of that civil session with the superintendent, a man at once educated and physically well exercised, that he was in the clear, and he continued to think so even when he was separated from Einstein and taken to a jail in an outlying area. Perhaps because of the difficulties he and Einstein had had in arranging their surrender, and because Einstein, explaining the delays, had at a certain stage talked of the police having to “go through” their cases, Willie had confused the idea of surrender with the idea of amnesty. He had thought that after he had gone to the police headquarters and surrendered, he would be released. And he continued in that hope even when he was taken to the jail, and checked in, as it might be into a rough country hotel, but by rough country staff in khaki. There was a certain repetitiveness about this checking in. The new arrival felt less and less welcome after each piece of the jail ritual.
“All this is unnerving to me, of course,” Willie thought, “but it is an everyday business to these jail officers. It would be less disturbing to me if I put myself in their place.”
This was what he tried to do, but they didn’t appear to notice.
At the end of his checking in he was lodged in a long room, like a barrack room, with many other men. Most of them were villagers, physically small, subdued, but consuming him with their bright black eyes. These men were awaiting trial for various things; that was why they were still in their everyday clothes. Willie did not wish to enter into their griefs. He did not wish to return so soon to that other prison-house of the emotions. He did not want to consider himself one of the men in the long room. And out of his confidence that he was going soon to go away and be free of it all he thought he should write to Sarojini in Berlin — a jaunty, unsuffering letter: the tone was already with him — telling her of all that had happened to him in the years since he had last written.
But writing a letter wasn’t something that could be done just like that, even if he had had pen or pencil and paper. He could think of writing that letter only the next day, and then the sheet of writing paper that the jailer brought him, as an immense favour, was like a much handled page of an account book, narrow, narrowly ruled, torn at the left edge along perforations, rubber-stamped in purple with the name of the jail at the top on the left, and with a big, black-stamped number on the right. That sheet of paper — thin, curling back on itself at the unperforated edge — cast him down, turned his mind away from writing.
Over the next two or three days he learned the jail routine. And, having put the idea of imminent release out of his mind, he settled into his new life, as he had settled into the many other lives that had claimed him at various times. The five-thirty wake-up, the standpipes in the yard, the formality of tasteless jail meals, the tedium of outdoor time, the long idle hours on the floor during lock-up time: he sought to adapt to it with an extension of the yoga (as he used to think of it) with which for a long time, since he had come back to India (and perhaps before, perhaps all his life), he had been facing everyday acts and needs that had suddenly become painful or awkward. A yoga consciously practised until the conditions of each new difficult mode of life became familiar, became life itself.
One morning, a few days after he had come in, he was taken to a room at the front of the jail. The superintendent he liked was there. He liked him still, but at the end of the interview, which was about everything and nothing, he began to feel that his case was not as easy as he had believed. Einstein had spoken of some trouble with Willie’s “international connections.” That could only mean Sarojini and Wolf, and that of course was where his adventure had started. But at the next interview, with the superintendent and a colleague of the superintendent’s, nothing was said about that. There was the incident he had had to forget, the incident Einstein (who clearly knew more than he let on) said he didn’t want to hear about. There had been witnesses, and they might have gone to the police. But nothing was said about that in the front room of the jail. And it was only during the fourth interview that Willie understood that the superintendent and his colleague were interested in the killing of the three policemen. Willie, when he thought of that, was more concerned with the pathos and heroism of Ramachandra; the policemen, unseen, unknown, had died far away.